Question:
Our city is having some problems with respect to graffiti on street and park trees. Can anyone advise any products or solutions for graffiti removal that will not injure the trees?

Choices:
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Ray, This is a much debated question. There are no chemical treatments I know of that will remove paint without causing harm to the tree.

If the trees are large enough and have thick bark (elms, ash, tuliptree...) a wire brush and some elbow grease can get much of it off. For young trees or those with thin bark, I wouldn’t recommend this. A the bark ages, tiny flakes fall off, exposing the next deeper layer. Eventually all the paint will disappear, but it could take several years, depending on species and growth rates.

Here in Auckland some telephone exchanges (I think that is what they are called, the boxes full of wires that sit in the pavement) have been painted like what lies behind them, so when ,for example, you pull up to the lights it is hard to see the box as it blends in perfectly with the background (apart from the blue baloon that never blows away). I have not seen one tagged (graffiti name mark) not that I look that hard. Perhaps taggers don't tag art as they see themselves as artists. So, A good artist could be employed to paint bark on the graffiti so it was not immediately apparent and so long as the new paint adhered to the old paint succesfully, the paint would then flake off with age an no damage would have occured to the tree. You would have to be careful that unscrupulous artists did not go around creating themselves employment by tagging trees.
The only other graffiti experience I have had recently is when the owner of a wall painted it white, again, then wrote in small but easily read letters 'IF YOU TAG YOU ARE A FAG' and the wall was not tagged any more.